I’ve never actually made a female character in Mass Effect. I’ve played that way in Dragon Age and KOTOR, but never even bothered to try in ME. So, I don’t really know what the limits of character creation are. I’m guessing, based on my recollections, that you can’t have a tubby adventurer wheezing through space. This scene is actually more like what you can do in Saints Row 2 (I think) which is pretty much anything. (I basically made a character just to test the limits, played for ten minutes, and quit because I didn’t like the gameplay.) In actuality even regular Carol would be straining the limits of character creation in most games. Middle age Carol would go so far beyond those limits you couldn’t even get close. Most games just try to scale up the generic breast, which is typically not how breasts grow, and is really off putting. Leaving them however they start is about as good as it’s going to get, so a lot of the time I don’t bother with customizing a character at all. My Shepard is straight from the tin. This is partially because he’s the face of the game in the game media. In KOTOR they never show the player character in promotional stuff, so I didn’t go in with preconceived notions. That made it easier to build a character however I wanted. Basically by making generic Shepard iconic it discouraged me from experimenting.

I tend not to even try to change body types in games where you can edit your avatar because fat characters tend to look really weird. The framework of the player character is usually built around the idea of the nebulous ideal. That tends to mean the statue of David for men and Barbie for women, assuming the option is there at all. I used to play WWE games from time to time and female characters in those are historically terrible. I haven’t played a modern one, so I don’t know if that issue has ever been addressed, but my guess is no. On the n64 the men weren’t even much more than a series of squares, but they did manage to make relatively decent fat guy bodies, surprisingly.

In The Godfather you could make an okay fat dude, because some of the main cast were fat, so they had to make the framework function properly anyway. (I assume.) So I actually played through once as a pretty accurate representation of myself.

In Fire Emblem: Awakening I played as a female avatar more times than not because one of the face choices looked enough like Carol that I couldn’t resist. She’s on the thin side, but still has an aura of what my mind recognizes as Carolness. My Animal Crossing Mayor is also molded after Carol, although it took a while before the options became available to get it done. AC makes you work for customizations. I also have spike hair Thomas, Jo, and Nina (Who looks the least correct…) I played Dragon Quest 9 as Brooksie, Carol, Nina, and Reggie, because those were the best analogs I could make in the character creation. Basically I leave characters alone if I’m presented with a “standard option” if not, I try to make them look like a character from my comic. (Which speaks of a sad sort of obsession that I observe in many webcomic creators…)

In any case, Carol is not one of those people who thinks she will remain young and thin, relatively speaking, forever. For someone who kind of hit the genetic lottery the future is not all that bad, especially if the traits your mate likes are the ones that tend to expand over time.

45 Comments

If you are going to play a female in one game and one game only, play Mass Effect and I can’t think of anything close. I like Mark Meer and I think he did a good job with MaleShep…but Jennifer Hale was so awesome as femShep that after a playthough, it is hard to go back to maleShep. I didnt think twice about headbutting the Krogan…’cause femShep is just that badass. Just my $.02

Fisher is an awesome choice for the altShepard character name, btw. Totally on the same wavelength. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a name possibility before they settled on Shepard.

I rarely put much thought into the characters at first. Unless there’s the option to edit them later in the game most of them tend to be a wheel spin of traits so I can get to the gameplay. Trying to play as “me” isn’t something I’ve ever considered. I mean I do that every day.

If you have Saints Row 2 on PC, you can get a mod called Gentlemen of The Row which incluses features which allows you to make your character 3 foot tall up to 7 foot tall and be as skinny or fat as you like.

With Bioware saying only 18% of the 87% who change from default Shepard use the female version (or just 18% period, depends on the article) but either way, that just doesn’t sound like “a lot” of people play as her.

From my perspective femshep is wildly popular because almost everyone I know has played through at least one game as her, if not the series. That stuck in my head since it’s pretty odd. What the actual numbers are I couldn’t say, but based on my experience the female option was popular.

87% change from male default…means 13% take default maleShep.If it is just 18% of total…femShep default is actually more popular than maleShep default.If it is 18% of 87% of total…is still 15.7%…and still more popular.

If those figures are anywhere close to accurate, then it is pretty amazing since the official femShep default didn’t actually appear until 3. I am pretty sure it was the result of a fan pole…so it isn’t just the makers that have embraced we ginger overlords :-))

According to Bioware, it was 13% use Default. The rest (87%) change something else. Of that 87%, 18% change the gender to female. They didn’t say in the article how many changed up the default female model.

I only brought it up, because Jackie said the difference was more along the lines of not wanting to screw up the looks/what have you. So “a lot” seemed a bit off to me.

Being that it’s not Mass Effect at all now in any way and everything can change, then it matters not :p

I figured less fan poll and more likely they can read the data of those who get online with the game, but article didn’t mention how they got the numbers.

I made my character look like Harley Quinn in saints row 3. I tend to try and play with sliders when I want to create a character to fit the tone of the game I play. Psychotic murdering gang lord? Batman villain seemed to fit.

And I agree with you whole heartedly about the mass effect Shepard being iconic and not wanting to customize. I didn’t with my femshep.

That aside I think the only times I’ve tried to make a self insert is when I create the console avatar. Ecks bawks live and mii.

I usually have some story in my head for a being of that power set (sometimes matching the world sometimes not) and try to make the avatar resemble that. ….Oooor if its a damage dealing mage anywhere close to human looking I just try to make Lina Inverse because she is awesome!!

My friend decided to join me in the original pay to play Champions Online which I was unable to play ultimately. They continued and ended up obsessed with “winning” all the costume pieces and body mod options necessary to make copies (or close to same) of every comic book super hero/villain or powered being from another game/movie they had ever known including other MMO’s. For a couple years any time I went over there I had to sit through a “fashion parade” of all the characters they had made and say how close or not they were etc… before we could DO anything else. They didn’t even play many of the characters! Champions Online allows a lot of customization of the power sets and how they look (you can have any color of lightning bolt you want etc…) so that was often a part of the “show”. The game itself was easy and bored them. They rarely needed any team mates to win against it. They just kept endlessly playing for the fashion and mod possibilities….

When I started playing Mass Effect, I quickly decided I didn’t like standard Shepard’s stereotypical military look, and switched to female. Never going back. Jennifer Hale did such a fantastic job with the voice over that I am disinclined to even acknowledge that male Shepard exists.

I’ve never played any of the Saints Row series, but I did buy 2 and 3 in a bundle not too long ago. I saw in the description of character creation on the Steam store page for 2 that there are options for genderqueer or intersex characters. That is the only reason why I am at all interested in playing it, and it’s reason enough. I want to see how it was handled.

At least in classic games weight and height always seemed to be stretch tools so people can pull off dwarfs well, but nothing else and outside of scifi it is a little less helpful. I still do skinny, as I probably fall under danger zone weights, and even when I draw myself or others everything is so out of proportion that this lazy solution actually seems correct to me. ME just having audio is great but two sets is amazing. The only similar I’ve

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by femShep’s build in the games. Obviously, whether male or female, you don’t get to change Shepard’s body shape, only their face, which leaves you with kind of a blah expectation that they’re gonna be perfectly built space gods. Having never played as male Shep I’m not sure on him, but female Shep had a surprisingly practical body, with muscular arms and thick thighs and small breasts. She wasn’t perfectly in proportion (outside of her armor) and she actually looked strong and capable rather than just attractive, I found it refreshing.

Yeah, I actually started a Mass Effect 3 game to refresh my memory of the character creation. I made a femshep just to see what it was like for a minute before going back to my original unfinished game. I have to say, femshep has a pretty generous butt. She was actually thinner than I expected outside her armor though. Shepard as a male is pretty built, even for a soldier. Not a slab of meat like James, but bigger than most military men I’ve ever met.

I think that the character creation for Phantasy Star Universe was pretty good when it came to making chubby people, as I have made some a few times. Making Females on there came out nice as well. A lot of the outfits seemed very curve friendly in a more real way too except the Rappy suit (looked like a big canary) and one dress which came out very poofy but i have to say that the Rappy suit even on a big person still looked cute and hug worthy.

I think Dynasty Warriors 7 empires was pretty decent too as far as making chubby ladies go as most of the clothing were also curve friendly except if you you made the breast too big based on what you wore and how you had other things.

my main complaint about Saints row 3 is that a lot of the outfits were not curve friendly and sometimes just looked awful on anyone that was any kind of big and sometimes even super muscle people.

Ah, that’s right, PSO did make cute chubby characters. I remember trying it now that you bring it up.

Saint’s row characters seem a bit ugly to me no matter what you do to them. Kind of like with wrestling games. Well, at least with the older ones. I haven’t tried anything current gen that I can remember.